Mushroom workers, feeling abused by their employer and the UFW, demand new leadership at the flailing union. “Some 300 workers went on strike against the UFW and Monterey Mushroom” on May 25, “demanding a pay raise, just treatment from their managers, and new leadership in the UFW,” KION-TV reported. This is the first time in memory that UFW members have protested in large numbers to demand an end to the UFW’s ineffective – and what some allege to be morally corrupt…

The Los Angeles Times is treating the UFW one of its front organizations as two separate groups. In a January 12 story on produce standards in Mexico, the Times quoted UFW Vice President Erik Nicholson as a critic. That’s proper journalism. But the Times then quoted someone from the Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) as a separate authority – without disclosing that UFW VP Nicholson is Chairman of EFI. That’s sloppy journalism. To put it kindly. EFI says it’s to help…

Houweling’s Tomatoes is in a toxic partnership with a UFW front group to try to show its customers that it’s “helping” farm workers. Houweling’s seems not to care that the UFW is in collusion with politicians to force contracts on workers who vote NOT to be part of the union that neglected them for a generation. The UFW front group, called the Equitable Food Initiative (EFI), is a lobbying organization based in Washington, D.C., and partnered with low-cost retail giants…

UFW can’t get worker support, so it’s kissing up to farmers, who give something juicy in return. United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez acted like a big industry CEO at the Delaware-based Produce Marketing Association‘s #FreshSummit in Orlando, Florida last week. Houweling’s Tomatoes let Arturo have a little squeeze, according to its Facebook page. In this picture, Arturo looks like he’s part of the industry now. Who does the UFW represent now – the farmworkers? Or the produce industry. His picture…

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton secretly promised to help the UFW suppress the votes of thousands of Central Valley farmworkers. WikiLeaks released an internal Clinton campaign email last week that exposed the secret February 21, 2016 pledge. Clinton made the promise as part of a deal for the UFW’s political endorsement against rival Bernie Sanders. After promising to do “everything possible” against Gerawan farmworkers, Clinton met in private with UFW President Arturo Rodriguez, the email shows. “She [Clinton] was asked to…

UFW President Arturo Rodriguez is bragging that his union will raise farmworkers’ salaries by a whopping 50 percent in 5 years. But not in California. Rodriguez and UFW Vice President Erik Nicholson were in Nicaragua this week to push for the 50 percent raise for local farmworkers in the mountains of Matagalpa. A fifty percent raise sounds like a lot. But in Nicaragua, it’s very little, which is why the UFW didn’t attach a dollar figure to its work the…

Dues-paying members of the United Farm Workers ought to ask union president Arturo Rodriguez what he’s doing with the 3 percent of their salary that the UFW takes out of their paychecks. They might ask, “Why is the UFW organizing people in Nicaragua, when it stopped organizing in California?” Earlier this year, California Agricultural Labor Relations Board Chairman William Gould lamented that union organizing had “completely disappeared” in the state’s many farms. Farmworkers have been paying Arturo Rodriguez’s UFW salary…